Ever wonder how carbon offsets for greenhouse-gas emissions work?

Say you love revving your General Moguls 6,000-pound, nine-passenger Road Rager SUV around your neighborhood, but you know you're vomiting tons of CO₂ into the air. Your neighbors lecture you, curse you, and won't invite you to any of their backyard barbecues.

So you decide to buy one of those "carbon offsets" you've heard about. After all, Al Gore claims it's okay for him to travel in private jets and limos and live in a mansion because he uses those carbon-offset thingies to cancel out his own pollution.

First you go online and find an emissions calculator, which is a program that tells you how much you are gagging the planet, how guilty you should feel, and how much you will have to spend to offset that guilt.

The money you pay for the offset is funneled through a corporation that skims a cut for itself and feeds the remainder to a taxpayer-subsidized corporate farm that grows subsidized corn that gets turned into subsidized ethanol that fuels a subsidized hybrid car that produces zero CO₂ emissions, thereby helping to "offset" all the crap you've been pumping into your neighbors' lungs.

But where do you buy one of these carbon offsets?

Simple. You buy it where Planet-Saver-in-Chief Al Gore buys his carbon offsets.

From a company called Generation Investment Management.

Never mind that Al Gore is chairperson and co-founder of Generation Investment Management, that he buys his carbon offsets from himself, that his incessant carnival barking about the imminent death of the planet is motivated by the desire to bloat his company's stock value, which in turn is turning him into a multi-shillionaire.

Your neighbors will love you and will congratulate you and will invite you to watch Monday Night Football with them.

You are now a politically correct Greenie. Nothing has actually improved. Your neighbors still choke on your fumes and Gore still makes enough money to choke a horse, but you're Green!

If offsets can save the world, why can't they solve the rest of humankind's problems?

Let's say that, in addition to gunning your Road Rager through your neighborhood, you also enjoy beating your wife.

This upsets everyone in your neighborhood, and your family, and the police who keep getting called to your home.

No problem. You simply buy a wife-beating offset.

The money you pay for the offset is funneled through a corporation that skims a cut for itself and feeds the remainder to a taxpayer-subsidized home for battered women run by taxpayer-paid social workers who operate taxpayer-paid feel-good psychological counseling sessions that teach women to leave their abusive husbands so they and their kids can live on the taxpayer-paid dole.

In fact, the more you beat your wife, the more offsets you'll have to buy, and the more battered women you'll help.

Your neighbors will be proud of you and will congratulate you for being sensitive and considerate and will invite you to their homes for Pictionary right up until your desperate housewife blows a hole through your frontal lobe with your own .357 Magnum.

But don't think offsets can't get even more politicized. The more that libertarian/Republican/old-line-traditional-conservative presidential candidate Ron Paul preaches about stopping our preemptive war in Iraq and ending torture and obeying the Constitution, the more a smattering of Republicans and Democrats might develop an actual twinge of conscience and decide to buy a political offset.

With a political offset these Republo-Demohacks can pretend to be just as libertarian as real libertarians while continuing their time-honored traditions of taking bribes and payoffs and kickbacks and palm grease.

Offsets, you now see, don't actually do anything in the real world. Offsets are a game played by people with money and political connections.

Have fun.

More of Garry Reed's writing can be found at (http://www.freecannon.com).

Comments (4)

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written by Maria Folsom, December 06, 2007

Gee, I can "offset" all my sins this way! Count me in! Garry, you are great. Thank you AGAIN for exposing the ludicrous programs we are expected to follow.

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written by Michael Moran, December 10, 2007

Excellent thinking, Gary! Does this mean I'll be able to buy "methane offsets" whenever I eat at Taco Bell?

Good Lord, what have I done, saying this in public?! I think Hillary just added it to her platform...

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written by David S, December 11, 2007

Hmmm. Got any offsets for beer drinking? ;)

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written by Tyson Danner, December 11, 2007

What's most disappointing about Mr. Reed's diatribe isn't the way he throws around ridiculous terms like "Republo-Demohacks", but the fact that, for all his complaining, offers no real solutions. His website is even more laughable.

Aside from arts news, I read the Reader for intelligent discussion on topics important to me. If I wanted to read rants like these, there are hundreds of blogs on both ends of the political spectrum I could visit. Here's hoping this second-in-a-row "Commentary" by Mr. Reed is the last.

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